In the late 1970s, I was living and working in Los Angeles, having recently finished attending college there. An acquaintance of mine, a member of a makeshift choir that sang Christmas carols at charity fundraising events, invited me to join the group one holiday season as they were short of male singers. The offer sounded intriguing and I readily accepted.
Several times in December of that year, I donned a tuxedo and joined the approximately 25 other singers in performing jazzy contemporary Christmas carol arrangements at ritzy hotels in exclusive Los Angeles locations: Bel Air, Hollywood and Beverly Hills. From the caliber of the hotels in which we sang and the fancy clothes worn by the attendees at these bashes, I knew I was rubbing elbows with the upper crust of Los Angeles society. It was quite exciting!
Our group must have been pretty good because we were invited to do a gig in Palm Springs. For that performance, our choir rode a charter bus from Los Angeles out into the desert, put on our formal wear and presented a holiday concert for some of the wealthy elite who lived there.
One of the songs in our repertoire was Mel Torme’s famous “Christmas Song,” the one that begins, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.” I knew we would be singing that as part of our Palm Springs performance, but I didn’t know that Mel Torme himself would be in the audience.
